Sunday, October 14, 2012

Realangst

Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund,
developed her psychodynamic model of the defense of the ego during World War
II. She identified three sources for young children’s anxiety, including
anxiety emanating from the id, anxiety emanating from a perceived inability to
meet the demands of the superego, and anxiety emanating from Realangst,
or justified fear. Realangst,for Anna, reflected the war’s very real traumas on young children
displaced from their mothers.

My
realangst is, I believe, a subconscious and intuitive response to a collapsing
eco-system, whose death pangs resonate through dependent life forms.

However,
sorting out the specters of my imagination, my psyche, from those grounded
firmly in reality, has proven challenging.

Deliberate
assessment of the quantity of my realangst, my justified fear, is difficult
when the responsible protective agent – the government - is missing in action,
providing no useful data that would allow anxieties to be measured, assessed,
and tempered through rational adjudication.

How
much radiation has really been released from the Fukushima nuclear plant and is
Fukushima radiation responsible for the list of anomalies I’ve detected?

My realangst accumulates in direct proportion to
what little data have been made available regarding the scale of the disaster
and contamination. The data that are available produce generalized realangst,
as illustrated by this fragment of conversation concerning the status of the
Daiichi plant by NRC regulators on March 16:

Accordingly, one regulator states the status of the plant has progressed to
at least "2 reactors [in meltdown], multiple spent fuel pools and maybe 4
reactors and 4 spent fuel pools...." The prognosis is considered grim: “We’ve
just not seen any mitigation of any of the events and we would take all the
spent fuel pools and probably all the four reactors into the final conclusion
because we’ve not seen any mitigation…."[i]

Realangst is also produced by the lack of
information about contamination throughout Japan and the Northern hemisphere:

A study measuring thyroid exposure to
Iodine-131 conducted between April 12 and April 16 2011 published in Research Reports found “extensive
measurements of the exposure to I-131 revealing I-131 activity in the thyroid
of 46 out of the 62 residents and evacuees measured” (p. 2). The measurement device
used to detect Iodine-131was a 3-inch NaI(Tl) scintillation spectrometer used
to measure gamma activity at the neck of the resident being tested.[ii]

I happen to have two children and live about 5 hours
from the US west coast so my anxiety about contamination has been pressing.
Robert Alvarez reports in a June 2012 True News interview that a spent fuel
pool fire could produce cesium-137 levels 60X Chernobyl http://www.blogtalkradio.com/trunews/2012/06/07/trunews-june-7-2012.
Cesium-137 has been detected on the west coast:

Gundersen’s data have raised
realangst. So did the reports of radioactive seaweed and contaminated tuna
caught off the coast of San Diego.[iii]

Then, there are reports that
cannot be substantiated. If real, these reports should raise considerable alarm,
considerable real angst. However, the secretive, conspiratorial management of
information concerning this disaster impinges against the rational assessment
of information necessary for managing real angst.

The idea, demonstrated
empirically by an experiment conducted by Professor Watanabe of fukushima
University that a radioactive plume is circling the earth every 40 days, raises
still more angst, particularly when coupled with spiking radiation levels in US
cities:

Fukushima: How bad is it? I need to know how much of my angst is real and how much of it is derived from imaginary specters generated by my psyche. How can I know so that I can either be mobilized to appropriate action by my realangst or, conversely, so that I can put my restless psyche to rest?

3 comments:

The are only a few things like war that give a human a chance to show their real mettle. Not wanting to go to a politically motivated war of any sort, personally....however this nuke thing going on now is a war that we are in, like it or not. But rather than reacting with fear and realangst, consider reacting as a warrior, given the chance for real greatest if you can dismiss fear as the mind killer.

Brandish and sharpen your written words and PPT's, and so it begins, a chance in our lifetimes for greatness.

Yes, when we all reaching or own personal tipping point that moves us to action and what action will be take? Does it really matter if Fukushima is just as bad as you think it could be, if it is a little better or even worse? The ultimate problem is that nuclear plants can have accidents and that industry and government work together to protect nuclear progress at the cost of the health of the environment and our health. If Fukushima is not providing the rock hard evidence needed to motivate one to action then maybe the next nuclear incident will, be it San Onofre, Vermont Yankee, Pilgrim, Palisades, Dresden, Ft. Calhoun etc… My point is why wait until the next one?

About Me

I am a Professor at a large public university. I study political economy and biopolitics (the politics of life). My interests are diverse but are broadly concerned with economic, social and environmental justice. I have published 5 books: Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy and Ecological Sustainability: The Threat of Financial and Energy Complexes in the Twenty-First Century (2016); Fukusima and the Privatization of Risk (2013); Constructing Autism (2005); Governmentality, Biopower and Everyday Life (2008/2011); Governing Childhood (2010).
I also participated in an edited collection on Fukushima: Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization (2014).